Thoughts from Contextly on Media Innovation

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Following the news that you care about shouldn’t be hard.

But we’ve all had that situation where we read a story that leaves us with questions and wanting us to know what’s next. Just recently, the two-week Ellen Pao sexual discrimination case roiled Silicon Valley, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid announced he would not seek re-election, and, in California, nearly everyone is concerned about the ongoing drought.

Unfortunately, it’s all too easy to a miss crucial update to a story, or to show up in the middle of a story and feel like you have been dumped into the Sea-of-Contextlessness.

Making it simpler for readers to follow the stories they care about is why we built the FollowUp button, which we are announcing today.

Publishers have just gained a potent tool in the battle for readers’ attention and loyalty. Today Contextly introduces Channels.

Many publishers write stories that consistently fall into a small number of topics. Contextly Channels now make it possible for readers to subscribe to these topics without any editorial work.

What are Channels and how do they work?

1) Contextly will identify 10-20 topics that are most salient in your publication. The objective is to have over 50% of your stories fall into one of these topics. These form the basis of Channels. The Channels do not rely on your tags and categories. (You can give editorial input into this process if you like, but for the sake of efficiency, editorial involvement in selecting the topics is optional.)

2) A Channel Button is then inserted in the stories that belong to a topic.

This is a Contextly Auto-Sidebar on Cult of Mac. The recommendations are algorithmically chosen, and the Auto-Sidebar updates as you publish new content.

At Contextly, we’re big fans of sidebars in the body of stories. Sidebars with smart recommendations show off the depth and breadth of your site, and add a nice visual flair without interrupting a reader’s flow through a story.

Sidebars also typically bump recirculation CTRs 25 to 50%.

So we’re excited to announce that it’s now possible to put algorithmically powered, constantly updating sidebars in every story on your site.

Previously, Contextly sidebars required a little editorial effort to place them in a story. That’s no longer the case.

Infinite scroll, the web design practice that lets readers scroll down into more stories on a news site after reaching the end of a post, became popular with news publishers after the rise of feed-based sites like Instagram, Facebook and Twitter.

Infinite scroll’s not a simple thing to implement. URLs have to change in the address bar as the reader moves to the new story. Analytics packages have to know when to recognize a new read. Ad units have to be timed to fire again.

Infinite scroll is a recommendation system.

But infinite scroll looks like social networks do, so publishers keep adopting it. (Though some, like Forbes, have abandoned it).

I’ve never seen an infinite scroll implementation that’s smart. Or to put it more kindly, I’ve never seen an infinite scroll site that uses data smartly to decide what to show next.

No one cares about this block of text author bio, but it takes up beachfront real estate on this post.

I spent ten years of my life writing on the internet, and for the first 3 years, got paid mostly in bylines.

Bylines, for those who don’t follow journalistic lingo, are a fancy name for the author’s name on a piece.

As an ego-driven bunch, writers care a lot about bylines. Writers reading other writers seek bylines out when they start reading a story (so to later know who to envy or disdain or both).

But readers don’t care about bylines, and most don’t even notice who wrote a piece. Bless the ones that do care, but for the most part, if readers notice anything about a story, they notice the publication.

If they share a story or mention it to a friend, they will say, “Oh, the Washington Post had a great story about how acetaminophen kills empathy.” They won’t remember the piece’s author Alice Ellis Nutt at all.

And the thing readers care even less about than bylines are author bios.

There are things publishers can’t count on the internet. Things that don’t show up in Google Analytics or in Chartbeat.

I know that sounds like heresy in the age of pageview quotas and dashboard fetishism.

It sounds a bit odd to say, like a vote of no confidence, coming from a co-founder and CEO of a data-driven engagement company – Contextly. I know firsthand some of the incredible things that can be built using data and algorithms. We innovate publisher engagement tools like our FollowUp button. It is, however, important to know the limitations of your tools.

And the uncountable things are very important things.

They may, in fact, be some of the most important things to publishers.

Things like a publisher’s reputation. Or, as some call it these days, their brand.

Here’s a few things that publishers can’t and don’t count:

Do “content recommendations” on the site appeal to readers’ basest selves and make readers feel dirty for clicking them?

Do readers start reading a story only to have that story blocked by a pop-up with X that’s nearly invisible to find or requires them to click on a link like “No, I don’t want to buy life insurance to protect my family. Let them beg on the streets and build character.”

How do readers feel about having to be the Lloyd Bridges in Airplane fighting off petitioners as he enters the airport — when all the readers want to do is just read to the end of an article?

Do the ads insult their intelligence?

How many times do readers sigh? Or curse?

Do low-quality recommendations on the site pretend that they are personalized, even for readers that have never visited the site before?

Is the site readable on mobile devices?

Did a new-to-your-publication reader who followed a story link even remember the name of your site – or did they read one story and bounce off?

Are you covering the issues and stories that your core community cares about?

Yes, mobile browsers suck and crash too often. Web pages take too long to load. Too many publishers make it an Olympic sport to read a story to the ending killing pop-ups and dodging auto-playing videos.

The piece is a compilation of 100 jokes from American history, from 1906 to the present. Each changed society and comedy, breaking new ground and cultural barriers. There’s a nifty JavaScript timeline that lets you jump by year; but for the most part, it’s just HTML and embeds.

And it’s miraculous.

I’m far from a historian of comedy, so I’m not going to argue over the editorial choices; instead, I’m going to be a simple fan-boy.

I learned a lot from this list – in no small part because the SoundCloud and YouTube clips that accompanied each selection let me experience the joke accompanied by context..

That includes the opener – a 1906 joke from black comedian Bert Williams (who I was ignorant of). Thanks to someone who took the time to upload the likely now-in-public-domain recording, this bit of history just loads in a webpage on a mobile device.

For sites with hundreds of posts, there’s a rich underlying content that isn’t out of date and still gives value to readers. These older stories are what we call Evergreens, since they keep giving value to readers long after they have been published.

Contextly automatically identifies evergreen stories on our publishers’ sites and uses them as one of the recommendation strategies in the Explore section (we pair evergreens with personalization and popular). We’ve found that evergreens perform as well as or better than the popular sections.

The other great thing about evergreen stories is that they do change. We see stories, especially seasonal ones, bubble up and become relevant again.

Getting those in front of readers doesn’t just help readers; it helps publishers get the most from the work they do.

[For the month of November 2015, in honor of National Novel Writing Month and National Blog Posting Month #NaBloPoMo, I’ll be writing a post a day about a favorite Contextly feature. It’s a bit of a love letter and a bit of a how-to.]

There is video over there. There is text over yonder. And in the recommendation section never shall the two commingle.

Or at least that’s what it always feels like out on publisher’s websites.

We wanted to break down those silos, so we made it possible that text, video and even product recommendations could show up side-by-side in our recommendation modules. That’s just like the way chocolate and peanut butter play nicely in a Reese’s Peanut Butter cup.

So when a video is related to a story, we show the video in the Related recommendations. You can see that in the image above and the one below on a story from Make: about GoPro’s new drone.

We do this using the same technology that powers our text recommendations, using metadata and semantically important terms to figure out the relationship between various pieces of content.

You’ll also see videos and products in our Explore section, which uses 3 recommendation strategies: personalization, evergreen and popular.

We do also have standalone sections for videos and products, but videos and products should be first-class citizens.

[For the month of November 2015, in honor of National Novel Writing Month and National Blog Posting Month #NaBloPoMo, I’ll be writing a post a day about a favorite Contextly feature. It’s a bit of a love letter and a bit of a how-to.]

The middle of the month deserves a sneaky feature, so here it goes: Here’s how you can add a second site to your curation search and have Contextly think it’s your default site.

Let me explain: say you wanted to choose related links for your own site: redunkcoolsite.com. When you install Contextly, the default search site if you are choosing related links or creating a sidebar will be redunkcoolsite.com.

But say you had a second site: stupidcoolsite.com. And you wanted to link to a post from that site in your related section or a sidebar.

It’s a more common situation than you might imagine, and our solution is more graceful than you might suppose.